IN THE WAKE OF THE NEWS

White Sox's Nick Swisher starting to enjoy himself

Carlos Quentin added four hits and scored a run with a great hand-only slide.

Do you want to know how the White Sox have spent 69 days in first place, including the last 43 in a row? With great play like this from Dye and Quentin, that's how.

But if you want to single out a Sox swing that beat the Cubs 10-3 in Friday's game at beautiful, rat-free U.S. Cellular Field, it had to be a grand slam in the third inning by that good old son-of-a-Cub Swisher.

"Muscles!" a friend in a Swisher-model No. 30 jersey greeted him after the game.

Swish flexed.

He was having a good time, which is what he does best.

This is a guy who begins a postgame interview by pretending to be a judge on one of those daytime TV courtroom shows.

This is a guy who saw 52-year-old pitching coach Don Cooper accidentally pull a hamstring Thursday in the Dodger Stadium visitors dugout and said after the game: "I was cramping myself, I was laughing so hard."

This is a guy who celebrated his grand slam in the Sox dugout with Orlando Cabrera with a series of hand and foot gestures that were part Sammy Sosa, part Kung Fu Panda.

I asked Swish what in the world that was supposed to be.

"I don't know what you'd call that," he said. "I'll have to come up with a name."

"Original or did you steal it from somebody else?"

"It's all Cabrera," he said. "He's the one with the rhythm, not me."

Swisher loves having a ball at the ballpark. He is a bit of an imp, the kind of character who on some days can make even an Ozzie Guillen look as sober as a judge.

But here's the thing: Swish hasn't had quite as much fun as he expected to, except for the part about the White Sox spending most of 2008 in first place.

The impossible happened. Happy-go-lucky Nick Swisher turned unhappy.

"People were writing some things in the paper I didn't like," he said. "It was the first time in my life I'd ever been booed by fans at the park. Some of that stuff kind of hit me in the wrong way."

Swisher likes to be liked. He likes to keep a journal on his Web site, interact with the fans, mug for the TV cameras and keep the clubhouse loose. More than one person considers him a prime suspect in last month's Toronto blow-up doll caper, but not a judge in North America would convict him.

Moving here from Oakland was a shock to his system at first, then an awesome experience, then back to a shock.

"I stopped watching TV. I stopped reading the newspaper," he said.

He also stopped hitting.

Week after week, everybody waited for Swisher to get his groove back. But his batting average stayed low. And he didn't flex much. For a guy with 78 homers the previous three seasons, Swish hadn't been rocketing the ball out of the U.S. Cellular launching pad.

Guillen didn't give up on him. He put Swisher in left, center and right field and at first base. He batted him leadoff, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and last.

One day the manager even kissed Swisher's bat when Swish brought it to him to break the spell.

The guy simply could not get hot.

"Changing scenarios, changing teams ... some people put more pressure on themselves than they should," Guillen said.

As good as their right and left fielders have been, the Sox haven't been able to find an everyday center fielder and they have needed Swisher to fill in for Paul Konerko at first.

Another team might have had to bench him -- particularly in the thick of a pennant race.

The switch-hitting Swisher came to bat in the third with the "sacks packed with Sox," as TV voice Ken Harrelson likes to say.

He was hitting .232 and Cubs right-hander Ryan Dempster got a couple of quick strikes on him.

That's when he cleared the Sox's sacks.

A fist pump, a high-five from Quentin and a dance with Cabrera later, he was a happy camper again.

Swisher's father, Steve, once was a catcher for the Cubs and was at Wrigley Field last weekend as a fan.

"I can't wait to get in the car and call him on the way home," Nick said.

Everything is a little sweeter for Swisher now, and not only because his team is in first place.